Essay by Eric Worrall
“Health benefits” of CO2 pricing and lower CO2 emissions include having to walk and cycle more.
Australia finally has new climate laws. Now, let’s properly consider the astounding social cost of carbon
Published: September 8, 2022 4.00pm AEST
Thomas Longden Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
Richard Norman Associate Professor in Health Economics, Curtin University
Sotiris Vardoulakis Professor of Global Environmental Health, The Australian National University
Tom Kompas Professor of Environmental Economics and Biosecurity, The University of MelbourneThe federal government’s climate change bill passed the Senate on Thursday. Among the mandates in the new Climate Change Act are assessments of the social, employment and economic benefits of climate change policies.
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A letter we published today in The Lancet Planetary Health outlines the importance of measuring the effects of climate change on human health when assessing the social cost of carbon.
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A study this month in Nature put the global social cost of carbon at A$275 per tonne of CO₂ released. Impacts on health (49%) and agriculture (45%) accounted for most of this.
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Accounting for the social cost of carbon would lead to investment and policy decisions that support emissions reduction. It would also deter support for projects that increase emissions, such as new coal mines.
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Australia’s new annual climate change statement should also explicitly examine the health benefits of climate policies. These are likely to include fewer respiratory illnesses as a result of cleaner air, and increases in exercise associated with active travel options such as walking and cycling.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/australia-finally-has-new-climate-laws-now-lets-properly-consider-the-astounding-social-cost-of-carbon-190050
I don’t know where the scientists expect solar panels to come from, if they keep deterring coal mines. The only commercial process available today to make silicon for solar panels requires reacting pure silica with vast quantities of coal. This is why the slave factories of Xinjiang are one of the major global centres of solar panel manufacture – Xinjiang has the vast quantities of coal required.
A 49% health benefit from walking or cycling more – what they actually appear to be saying is they will deprive people of choice, to make them healthier. Is this really the kind of world we want, where other people dictate our health choices? Maybe some of us could use more exercise, but if all people really are priced out of their automobiles by carbon taxes, we all know people, or know of people, who would have difficulty cycling everywhere, even if this was the only option. I personally can’t cycle anymore, due to a sport injury.
But the real absurdity of the high social cost of CO2 claim is the claim that global warming would lead to significant agricultural losses. Even NASA admits the world is greening.
Looking to past warm periods, like the Cretaceous (age of the dinosaurs) or the extreme warmth of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when conditions were so bountiful our primate ancestors spread out from Africa to cover much of Eurasia and the Americas, all the way up to Greenland, the only “evidence” that warmer weather will lead to losses is the broken computer models used to produce such predictions.
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, up to 8C / 14F hotter than today, a tropical world of lush abundance stretching all the way to the poles, was not a place where it was difficult to find food.
So where is this great browning, this age of widespread agricultural losses, supposed to fit into a continuum of warming and rising abundance which leads to the tropical garden which was the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum?
The NASA observations of greening, and paleo-climate studies of past warm periods, ranging from the Holocene Optimum, the geologically recent period of climatic abundance which allowed our ancestors to abandon the hunter gatherer life, build towns and become farmers, to distant past periods of extreme warmth, like the warm period during which our primate ancestors spread across the world, tell us CO2 and warmth promote plant growth and food plant yields.
Cycling anywhere locally would be a bitch, as the Hill Country of Texas is both hilly and hot.Riding locally would have been an exercise project for me thirty years ago, and no way practical at 66 with a shoulder replacement.
Social cost of carbon calculation involve so many assumptions they are close to POOMA numbers. When changing the discount rate can make a cost a benefit, with the change resulting in a benefit being eminently defensible, SCC is an exhibit number.
I would suggest a more challenging trail for the President.
My heart rate went up and I had a mild anxiety attack just watching this clip. It looks like once you start on this trail, you can’t even dismount; there’s no room! Heck, I have trouble on the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Montana.
Geez, what’s the matter with you guys? I’m 80 with two new hips and a new knee and I can ride a bike, but it’s a bitch in the winter here in northern Illinois.
An 80 year old regularly cycles through our village in Kent. I have had to rescue him more than once and take him home in the car when he’s toppled off the damn thing.
He’s a liability, wobbling all over the road. He was kicked out the badminton club because he kept collapsing.
Being an old man as well, I stay away from bicycles.
Very wise.
I was out cycling and rode with an 80- something marine doing 20 miles at 15 mph.
Tom,
Please explain the term “POOMA number” to those of us less knowledgeable. Thanks.
“Plucked Out Of My …” at a guess.
Made me laugh. Using that one in future.
I’m more familiar with WAG – Wild Ass Guess – and it’s slightly brainier cousin, SWAG – Scientific Wild Ass Guess.
That sounds like a rationalization at best. Actually, it sounds more like an attempt to manipulate those who are not very bright. I dislike manipulators.
Bunch of jackbooted, goose-stepping martinets.
yes. those medieval serfs never had joint issues.
and these seffaggrandising a**holes have NEVER done a days hard work I bet
or gone without in their lives!
as modernday serf who at 63 is crippled with RA thanks to menial repetetive, low paid hi skill work, who couldnt afford to run a car for the majority of my life want to or not, I personally feel the urge to push people like this to a wall and pound some “life facts” into them, and worse is the the fact that just moving around daily is an effort, walloping them isnt possible
Having been involved in improving agricultural yields for over 50 years, I’ve seen many strive for credit. CO2 has never been given its due, and my guess is it’s a least 15 bushel of corn per acre..how much is this in $/ton CO2?
Dry corn 35-37 bu/ton, 2022 average price so far $7, If your guess is accurate, equal to $105 per ton of good CO2.
I’m still incredibly resentful that Biden suffered almost no political damage from such an event.
In my case, I walked away with a broken collar bone from a zero miles per hour unsaddlement. Keep your weight down, people.
The definition of a socialist is somebody who knows, way better than you, how you should live, and given power will legislate it. Oh well the Auzzie’s voted them in.
Not only did we vote Labor in to give us better weather, but we are also getting better health. Unfortunately I have yet to see the business case for these promises.
Simon, i would be surprised if they were legally voted in.
As with a number of countries as is my understanding, they are there with 30%+/- of the vote. Not actually a mandate to govern.
They cheated.
Now that Biden and his controllers have shown how easy it is to not only return the candidates no-one wants, but have any who question it demonised by the mainstream media, you can bet that there will never be another free and fair election for a long time, yet. “It is not who casts the ballots who decides, it is who counts the ballots.” — Joseph Stalin
We unfortunately voted in a pretty useless lot of politicians; political party irrelevant! I don’t recall these addled professors being on the ballot papers,
There is some redundancy in that description
most of us did NOT, but the systems set up that minors getting preferences can skew the end result
Some in Australia are determine to suffer the full stupidity that Europe is feeling with energy policy.
People like these mongrels give professors a bad name. My overall respect for them is in the toilet right now. I don’t want to hear that all professors aren’t like these jokers. I know all professors aren’t mindless blobs like these people but where are the good professors? Why aren’t the good professors calling into question what these bad people are saying? No I don’t respect people who know their colleagues are not honest and true yet sit on the sidelines and let the lies continue.
Absolutely top comment, Bob!
They are silent because they will be fired if they are “uncollegial”.
Then there’s Willie Soon.
Well said Bob. Academia has really gone down the tube these days, having sold it’s soul to the devil of politics.
My heart goes out to those in academia who have to choose between honesty and their career. Many just wind up lying to themselves, relying on Cognitive Dissonance to protect them.
Methinks these professors are educated beyond their capacity to think.
Never confuse education with intelligence; you can have a PhD and still be an idiot. –Richard Feynman
Just see what happened to Peter Ridd and Murry Salby for the answer to that one.
Just another “paper” in The Conversation where comment isn’t allowed. So many of these. I guess there are more thinking people who disagree. Nothing about the social benefits of carbon. They don’t seem to have the courage of their convictions, if they indeed have them.
It’s typical socialist double-speak. ‘The Conversation’, where conversation is not allowed, the ‘Open Mind’ that is anything but, ‘Skeptical Science’ which is naively credulous, ‘Real Climate’ which is as unreal as it gets, etc, etc…
A Fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy, an Associate Professor in Health Economics, a Professor of Global Environmental Health and a Professor of Environmental Economics and ‘Biosecurity’ [sic].
Beyond being useless ‘tax-Hoovers’ the authors are advocating the destruction of national wealth.
When I was studying Civil and Structural Engineering for my degree in the 1960s, there were lab technicians who were way more intelligent and practical than a dozen of these modern “Professors” screwed together.
When I was born life expectancy in Australia at birth was around 65 years and the CO2 concentration was around 310 ppm, life expectancy is now 83 years with CO2 at around 420 ppm.
The corollary is: CO2 is good for you quod erat demonstrandum.
Next step, dictate a narrowly construed “green” life style. Social Prison 3.0.
Perhaps their next paper could be to outline the Social Cost of Net Zero.
I suspect this would be much more than the SCC
germany/eu right now is a perfect example they could proudly hold up as a shining example of following greenidiocy
That represents about 50 to 100% increase in fuel cost if they add it on. Just what are they going to do with the revenue ? What social goodies can they give us peons that are better than keeping our houses warm in the winter and food on our tables ?
What’s worse, is that this increased cost of energy, fuel, and anything that requires either (ie everything), will predominantly affect the poorest in our society. It’s a direct punishment for the poor and disadvantaged.
And where will these taxes end up? In the very pockets of dimwit tax-scrounging ‘scientists’ like these. It’s an absolute travesty of justice. It needs a revolution, French style.
A revolution French style is too risky these days with all the STDs going around.
its ok madame guillotine can be wiped down with sanitiser
exactly
right now I can afford petrol to go 100k round trip to doctors or the 250k trips to specialists and thats while petrols got 22c a litre tax still off it
, still paying around 1.80 per litre;-(
Diesel is even more extortionate, 20c more right now.
DMacKenzie: “What social goodies can they give us peons that are better than keeping our houses warm in the winter and food on our tables?”
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A video collection of Kamala Harris’ Inspirational Speeches?
They are keen aren’t they, to control other people’s lives. Academia is a breeding ground for groupthink socialists and activists.
I’m in favor of a Professor Tax on universities, maybe a million bucks a year for every knucklehead they hire.
Or, just stop Federal government student loans & make the universities pay for student loan defaults. That will bring this scam called “higher education” crashing down. All the useless profs in useless “fields of study” will be asking, “Do you want fries with that?”
The last 2 years I have dramatically reduced my vehicle costs because I ride just about everywhere now. The city I live in is pretty flat, and the difference in travel time for almost all my trips is bugger all once parking time and traffic is taken into account.
But this is my choice, and should not be foisted on people because of some busy bodies who I suspect will have totally “valid” reasons for not changing from their current ways.
And let’s not forget that people in cars perform monkey acts which cause significant injury to people riding bikes. I’m recovering from a muppet opening a car door on me as I rode past. Luckily I managed to swerve to avoid the car door, but had to hit the car in parked in front of him to avoid hitting moving cars on my right. Were these sorts of incidents included in the study to evaluate the benefits of more pedestrian and riding traffic?
The Lancet Planetary Health
These small minded trogs just can’t get out of their rut and into Intergalactic Health where the real cutting edge sustainability is all happening.
wheres that planet they sent the “phone sanitizers “to?
Errm… I think it was called ‘Erff’, or something similar.
I worked in government policy for many years, for many departments, and the conclusion I came to is that if you put them all together, into one overall picture of society and the individuals in it, it would not add up to a life worth living. Nowhere near. But that’s not a quantitative outcome that can be put into bullet points in an executive summary.
The back of my envelope says that Brits are already paying over a thousand quid per tonne of C emitted on the petrol they buy. See https://cliscep.com/2022/08/28/ice-vs-ev-the-rematch/ and scroll down to “The Final Insult.”
It could be related-
Holding charge of £100 at petrol stations set to be rolled out across UK (msn.com)
Otherwise the climate changers can log on for a bucket of sunlight or wind elsewhere.
I notice none of those professors are actual scientists. If they stopped their Mickey Mouse research right now the world would not notice one jot.
Which raises the question: what is the “social cost” of all the useless research?
I wonder what social cost of CO2 would have to be levied for Australia to resemble the utopian Sub-Saharan lifestyle.
makes me want to hang head in shame that Aus has such damned fools as “advisory/science/lobbyists” allowed to exist to make peoples lives even more of a misery than they are.
abc has some close relationship to the convo trash so guess we will cop the mindwarp radio push yet again.
Id hoped to live long enough to see them jailed at the least, fainter hope by the day
More of the wealthy imposing ideological standards they can afford, on the poor.
Australia is one of only a handful of countries and the pioneer of laws that punish people of all ages for riding a bike without a helmet.
The 1990-1992 mandatory helmet laws saw a rapid decline in cycling participation of about 30-40%, and that reduction persists on a per capita basis. Over the past decade I’ve seen a grand total of two children riding a bike on my street.
Many countries cite the Australian experience as a reason not to enact all-age helmet laws, which is why 30 years later there’s still only a handful of countries that punish people for getting out of their cars and exercising. Hospitalised injuries per cyclist increased after Australia’s helmet laws were introduced, another reason why other countries avoid such laws.
I might fantasise that Australian politicians could see the logic in repealing helmet laws that discourage cycling and put more people in cars if they want to reduce carbon emissions by 43% in the next eight years.
Sadly, 30 years of disastrous participation and injury data hasn’t convinced them, which is why the idiots will keep the helmet laws despite such legislation increasing cyclist injury risk, damaging public health, increasing traffic congestion and now reducing the odds that their 43% fantasy will be achieved.
Zen you, Mannschaften Worrall, vill be confined to zee asylum.
I seem to recall $275 was the amount Albo promised us off our power bills perfessors.
These fools still think CO2 is a pollutant and climate driver, it is not.
All this NONSENSE is precariously balanced on a single molecule of CO2 in every 2500 ACTUALLY heating up the whole world.🙄 🤭😱🥳
Does it? Has it? Will it? Can it? —-: All questions you need to answer before you vote for someone who has a hand hovering over your wallet, itching for your credit card details.
“It would also deter support for projects that increase emissions, such as new coal mines”
Do these people live in the real world ?
The IEA say that getting the world to 200m-250m EVs by 2030 will require up to 127 new mines for lithium, nickel and cobalt. There are currently over 1.4 billion ICEVs in the world. Imagine how much more mining will be necessary to replace them all.
All mining creates large amounts of emissions.
Pretty much as is the case with the US government, the Australian government and woke climate alarmists there have no idea of what they mean by their attempts to “fight climate change™”.
To wit:
— “The report estimates Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions in the year to December 2021 were 488.0 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent”
source: https://www.industry.gov.au/news/australias-greenhouse-gas-emissions-december-2021-quarterly-update
— Meanwhile, according to the IEA, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 6% in 2021 to 36.3 billion metric tons.
Therefore, if Australia stopped ALL CO2 emissions from ALL sources, it would account for only 0.49/36.6 = .013 = 1.3% of global CO2 emissions into the atmospheric. There you have it, 1.3% tops.
Now, put that 1.3% reduction—accomplished at the expense of devastating the economy of, including exports from, Australia—against the above-stated fact that worldwide CO2 emissions rose 6% in 2021 alone.
But go ahead, tie me kangaroo down, mate, by imposing a “social cost” tax on CO2 emissions.
It is usually futile to engage people with facts and analysis who are in a state of condescending intellectual & moral superiority while expounding their ignorance to the world.
That bike ride from Perth to Sydney could take a while. Don’t expect to get there before the ice cream melts.
The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other peoples money.
The problem with socialist professors is eventually you run out of other peoples money faster.
Since May 17th earth has sequestered 29.3GtCO2 from the atmosphere.
There are concentrations as low as 405ppm areas in like NE Canada, Northern China, Central Africa, eastern amazon and mid-western America.
Carbon dioxide absorbs in water so when it rains concentrations goes down. In summer all the snow has melted and the biosphere greens. In the winter when snow returns the snow consists of carbon which is released back into the atmosphere. Over the snowy lands of Siberia and Russia concentrations tend to be higher than other areas.
By May next year slightly more than 29.3GtCO2 will be put back in the atmosphere.
The $275 is the 29.3Gt nature exchanges as well as the slightly more.
It is corruption like this that makes you sick to the stomach. Earth hasn’t heated up to the 1.2C, so many believe.
But this is part of the deception and fraud governments have committed themselves.
I’m hoping the UK government will do the right thing. So far things are looking promising.